After running virtualization.info for seven years, I will be starting a new job next year as Research Director for Gartner, where I will be covering cloud computing, virtualization and datacenter technologies in the IT Professionals research team.

I am extremely excited about this new role, as it presents the opportunity to work closely with and learn from truly brilliant minds, including well-known industry analysts like Chris Wolf, Drue Reeves and Richard Jones. Also, joining a top firm like Gartner will allow me to focus 100 percent on the newest, most innovative technologies that the market will offer.

While this is a thrilling step forward in my career, this announcement is bittersweet because it means I will be stepping down from my role with virtualization.info, as I will no longer be able to contribute directly or indirectly to the site due to a conflict of interest.

virtualization.info first appeared online September 11, 2003. Over the last seven years, virtualization.info has been my passion. I’ve tracked the birth and the evolution of a completely new, billion dollar market, the rise and fall of over 100 vendors, and the mainstream adoption of this disruptive technology that is virtualization.

In doing so, virtualization.info has been visited by millions of readers, from all continents, from all industries. Today most Fortune 500 and Global Fortune 2000 companies read our daily news, along with hundreds of thousands of smaller firms all around the globe, from US to Japan.

Today virtualization.info includes almost 5,000 pages of content. I like to think that the value of these pages is not just in their contents; these pages represent the historic archive of how virtualization has emerged and become a mainstream technology. Over 12,000 subscribers read our news through email newsletters, RSS feeds and social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The website also features unique assets like the Virtualization Industry Radar and the LinkedIn community called virtualization.info Vanguards.

My involvement in virtualization.info and cloudcomputing.info must cease today, Dec. 31, 2010, as I begin at Gartner on January 3, 2011. However, I’m pleased to say both sites will continue under the editorial leadership of Kenneth van Surksum. Over the last few months, I’ve worked with Kenneth and he has contributed content in line with the style I’ve defined over the last seven years. Kenneth has more than 10 years of experience in designing, building and maintaining data centers powered by the leading virtualization platforms, so I feel he will do a great job replacing me.

A Thank You to Supporters

There’s a long list of people that I’d like to thank for the success of virtualization.info. First of all, I want to thank the millions of readers who connected worldwide over the years, from US to Australia, passing through Iceland and South Africa. virtualization.info really reaches a global audience.

This audience didn’t just support the website by reading it; it greatly contributed to it, with passionate comments, tips, corrections, content. This audience has been so vocal about their preferences, that it really pushed the advertisers our way.

The market players deserve major recognition too. Few people know how much behind-the-scenes work is required to run virtualization.info.

The management, the CTOs, the marketing teams, the analysts and press relation teams of almost every player in this industry have connected with me on a daily basis, addressing all sort of questions, providing all kinds of materials, and exposing all sort of confidential roadmaps, etc. to make the site the most informative, objective online web site focused on virtualization. The research on the site would be simply impossible without their collaboration.

Of course I also want to thank the incredible amount of advertisers that spontaneously came to us since 2006. Some vendors really believed in virtualization.info in its early days, supporting it with campaigns for months, sometimes for years. It has been amazing, and it has demonstrated, I think, that the mainstream press is not the only way to reach your customers in an effective way.

A special thank goes to other business partners I have had along the way: the companies that provided the infrastructure behind virtualization.info, the people who designed and redesigned the website, the content providers who enriched the pages with whitepapers, books, job announcements, etc., and the teams that helped to build and deliver incredibly ambitious projects, like the Virtualization Congress and Datacenter on Demand (DonD).

Another special thanks goes to the company that translates virtualization.info into Japanese every day, for almost three years now. The website has had overwhelming success in Japan, beyond any expectations, which I couldn’t ever achieve without the professionals I’ve been lucky to work with.

The last thanks go to the person who ignited all of this, the one who introduced virtualization to me in 2002, and to my own team, which managed to deal with the complexity of the virtualization.info and cloudcomputing.info global presence with extremely limited resources.

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